A new picture book by Todd Oldham charts Joan Jett's journey from prototype
punk to leader of a new generation of female rock stars

If you are a woman of a certain age, then you may remember 1976 as I do: being a 15-year-old with a feather-cut, singing along to David Bowie in the bathroom (‘Rebel Rebel, I love your dress’) and the Runaways in the playground.

Photographs from the book Joan Jett by Todd Oldham (Ammo Books).

Just as nursery rhymes remain lodged in one’s head from childhood, so too do the lyrics of teen spirit; each as unforgettably simple as the other. If prodded, I could still sing you the Runaways’ ‘Cherry Bomb’:'Hello Daddy, hello Mom I’m your ch ch ch ch ch cherry bomb Hello world I’m your wild girl I’m your ch ch ch ch ch cherry bomb.’

And I could also tell you why the Runaways – in particular their founder Joan Jett – seemed to matter at the time: they were prototype punks, they were remarkably young (only 15 or 16 when the band was formed in Hollywood in 1975), and they were girls, in an era when guitars were more often wielded by men in spangly lurex or leather trousers.

Joan Jett, raised in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, but above all ‘Born To Rock’, looked just as tough as any of her male peers; tougher, actually, than some of the glam-rock Englishmen in make-up and platform heels, with an insouciance that influenced everyone from Siouxsie Sioux to Billy Idol (both of whom were in the audience when the Runaways played at the Roundhouse in London in 1976, along with several members of the Sex Pistols and the Clash).

And the rest of the Runaways appeared equally confident: Sandy West on drums, Lita Ford on lead guitar, Jackie Fox on bass, and Cherie Currie on vocals.

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Long before the Spice Girls shouted about Girl Power, or the music press ordained Riot Grrrl as the Next Big Thing, or Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin sang Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves, the Runaways looked to be the embodiment of liberation.

Except, of course, it wasn’t quite as straightforward as that; for like all the most memorable nursery rhymes and fairy tales, there is a dark twist. Little wonder the story has been retold for the Twilight generation in a Hollywood film starring Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie; beginning with a drop of blood on the ground (albeit menstrual, rather than vampiric). Why now, you might ask?

Well, why not? It’s an archetypal story – innocents tainted by experience on a roller-coaster ride of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll – released in a year when many of the Runaways’ original audiences have become parents to teenagers of their own.

Our mothers might have taught us something about feminism, but motherhood has a way of reminding women that liberation can also bring with it more opportunities for exploitation.

The biopic version of The Runaways, released in Britain in September, is directed by a woman – Floria Sigismondi, who came to fame as a maker of music videos – and its executive producer is Joan Jett, so one would expect a certain amount of insight into the sexism that prevailed in the Seventies music industry.

Hence we see Joan Jett (born Larkin) being told by her music teacher that ‘Girls can’t play the electric guitar’, while the Runaways’ Svengali, Kim Fowley, bullies his protégées while also preaching to them.

‘This is not about women’s lib,’ he declares in the movie. ‘It’s about women’s libido.’ As a film, The Runaways does not quite engage with the contradictions inherent in this manifesto, nor does it incorporate as much of the dark side of the memoir it cites as its source, Neon Angel by Cherie Currie.

In this book, and Edgeplay, a documentary made by a subsequent member of the Runaways, Victory Tischler-Blue, the nastiness of the story is more to the fore: rape, abortion, drug addiction, self-harming, suicidal despair.

Both Currie and Sandy West became addicts; the Runaways’ drummer died of lung cancer in 2006, having had several spells in prison; Currie got clean, worked as a drug counsellor, and is now a ‘chainsaw artist’.

As for Joan Jett herself: she is, to use the kind of cliché that is nevertheless integral to her mythology, ‘a rock ‘n’ roll survivor’. Still touring with the Blackhearts, she appeared on the Jay Leno show earlier this year to promote The Runaways, still clad in her trademark tight black leather, still tossing her dark spiky hair, as spookily unlined as a Twilight vampire.

Jett did not appear in Edgeplay but she is very much in evidence on the credits of The Runaways, as she has been in its associated publicity. She talked to Jay Leno about teaching Kristen Stewart to sing – and then proved that she could belt out Cherry Bomb with aplomb to the whooping audience in the television studio – and her pulling power apparently remains intact (a recent show at the 100 Club in London sold out in less than five minutes).

But still, one gets the sense that she’s still holding something back – the full story, perhaps, even in an era that expects tell-all confessional.

Whereas other members of the band – most clearly, Currie – have talked about Fowley as being ‘abusive’ and ‘exploitative’, Joan Jett maintains a cheerily upbeat tone, as is evident in a new book, a lovingly packaged photo-album-cum-memoir, designed by Todd Oldham.

‘When I see pictures of me and Kim,’ she observes, ‘it just reminds me that [we] were friends. He taught me how to write songs. I think he saw something in me. And it was easy for us to just sit there together.’

Currie remembered it differently: Fowley having sex with a woman in front of the teenage band, in order ‘to teach you dogs how to f---’. (Jett, for her part, says of Fowley, ‘he had his own language, everything had to do with “dog”. He used to use the word “dog puck”. Not that it meant anything.’)

The film version of the Runaways is more sanitised than Currie’s memoir, although it does touch on her account of her Sapphic encounters with Jett, which may excite some in the audience in a not dissimilar manner to those who came to watch the Runaways in the Seventies to drool over Currie’s stage costume of corset and stockings.

The Runaways split up in 1979, amid recriminations and hangovers and regrets. Jackie Fox went to Harvard and became a lawyer; Lita Ford continued to work as a guitarist; and Joan Jett took charge of her own career as leader of the Blackhearts, having been turned down by 23 major record labels, releasing I Love Rock ’n’ Roll (a number one hit on the Billboard charts for seven weeks in a row in 1982).

She will be 52 in September, and the last word, surely, must go to her. ‘Now, even to this day, all these years later, a girl with a guitar, a girl owning it, is very threatening.

'In the early days of the Runaways, our audience [had] never seen anything like girls playing rock and roll. We put it right in their face, man.’ Which is where Joan Jett is still putting it now.